Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of Labour's general election victory in 1997. It's also the start of the final week of campaigning ahead of the local elections on the 5th of May, which represent the first real test of the party's readiness to become the next government. With the self-congratulation of the political centre over the re-election of Emmanuel Macron still ringing in our ears, today is a good moment to consider the history and legacy of the New Labour project. Keir Starmer is clearly only a weak copy of Tony Blair: comfortable with the authoritarian and technocratic approach to government but hopelessly inadequate in terms of the ability to enthuse or inspire. In contrast, Macron has proven himself to be the real heir to Blair, not least in his ability to serially win despite being despised by a majority of the population. Other obvious parallels are the unapologetic shift to the centre-right and the suspicion that the electoral vehicle will not survive the end of its leader's time in office. But just as the parallels with France can be overdone, not least by Blairites indirectly criticising Starmer, so the comparison of the current and former Labour leaders can ignore the wider historical context.
An example of this can be found in the latest rueful memoir by Neal Lawson, the Director of the centre-left think-tank Compass, which appears in Prospect. His analysis captures the received wisdom of the New Labour years: that the win-at-all-costs strategy led to political compromises that undermined the possibility of truly radical change. As he puts it, "New Labour tried running up the down escalator of neoliberalism. They were at best naive about a project designed not just to privilege capital over labour, but to extinguish even the thought of mild social democracy. In so doing, it chose a path that was always doomed to fail." Lawson is typical of many centre-left commentators in characterising New Labour as a "formidable political project" and yet also strangely naive and guileless, which would be a startling paradox if true. The error here is in tying the "project" too closely to the personality of the leader, and in giving that individual the benefit of the doubt in terms of motivation. My own view is that Blair was the most cynical politician ever to inhabit Number 10. The current occupant doesn't come close. In other words, he knew perfectly well what he was doing. There was no naivety.
Another apparent paradox in the historiography of New Labour is the idea that it was at once a watershed, representing a clean break not only in Labour's history but in the wider political culture, and yet also the culmination of a long, patient rebuild of the party after the 1979 loss. Was it revolution or evolution? Was Blair sui generis or was he simply continuity Kinnockism? Lawson attempts to answer this by placing the project in the context of a challenging socioeconomic environment: "New Labour was a clever defensive move in the face of hostile tectonic structural shifts: from Keynesianism to free markets, from the nation state to the global economy, from the working class to individualised consumers, from muscular unions to rampant corporate power, and from the Cold War to American domination." The problem with this interpretation is that it treats 1979 as another watershed, which obscures just how much of the New Labour project was foreshadowed while Tony Blair was still at school.
The decisive break with Keynesianism occured in 1970 with the Nixon Shock, which marked the end of the Bretton Woods system and was a genuine watershed in postwar history. In the UK, the writing had been on the wall throughout Labour's time in office between 1964 and 1970, with periodic bouts of austerity and the growing media discourse around "welfare cheats". The social reforms of the period, championed by Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary, look in retrospect like the emergence of the neoliberal subject rather than the highwatermark of social democracy. Globalisation didn't happen overnight, but nor did it only start in the 1970s. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade began in 1948. The consumer society was already well-established by the 1960s, while the "muscular unions" of popular mythology reflected a steady erosion of the power of organised labour, not its supremacy. Industrial action in the period was overwhelmingly defensive in the face of inflation and closures. Strikes were a symptom of the breakdown of the social compact, not class war.
As for the shift "from the Cold War to American domination", New Labour reflected the persistence of older thinking rather than the acknowledgment of a new reality. In claiming that "Blair signed the nation up to the ultimate hubris of remaking the Middle East in the mould of the Washington consensus", Lawson ignores that remaking the Middle East was a long-established British habit that was not interrupted by the start of the Cold War, hence the Suez debacle. The 1983 invasion of Grenada, together with the ongoing Soviet-Afghan War, made it clear that we were already living in a unipolar world well before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Insofar as New Labour reflected the zeitgeist of the late-90s and the millennium, it was in the general air of surrender and acceptance. As Blair famously said in his 2005 conference speech, "I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer." New Labour was the product of vast social and economic changes that had been underway since the end of World War Two. It wasn't an agent of change but a symptom, and that is why it managed to achieve so little of lasting value during its time in power.
Lawson's belief that New Labour was a missed opportunity leads him to imagine a counterfactual: "It could have invested in alternative media to wean itself and the nation off Murdoch. It could have helped resource the unions to grow again and rebalance the dominance of corporate power. It could have democratised, rather than commercialised, some of the public sector. It could have given back real power and money to councils. It could have grown the Labour Party to become a force for good in communities and not just a leader’s fan club." Any one of these on its own is implausible, but in combination the impression is one of outright delusion. The reason why Blair didn't challenge Murdoch wasn't fear but because they largely saw eye-to-eye. New Labour sought to diminish the unions as independent entities, reforming them as the allies of both the state and capital. It had no interest in democratising public services for the very reason that this would have hindered greater commercialisation. And it certainly had no wish to restore councils as democratic bodies with significant power, as its preference for technocratic mayors and depoliticised managerialism made all too clear.
The idea of re-establishing Labour as a social movement drifts perilously close to Corbynism, and thus highlights just how much the contemporary Labour Party is engaged in a project to reanimate only the worst aspects of the New Labour years, shorn even of the role as a "leader's fan club", while refashioning the party apparatus as a cartel. Since becoming leader, Keir Starmer has been criticised from all directions for his lack of policy substance and his determination to attack the Conservative government almost exclusively on the grounds of incompetence and sleaze, while reassuring business and other vested interests that a future Labour government will change very little. While it is true, as commentators like James Meadway never tire of emphasising, that the party's programme is far more "leftwing" than it is given credit for, this simply reflects the structural changes since 2008 and the current global consensus. Labour has yet to take a bold policy decision outside of ostracising its previous leader. While Starmer's Blairite critics chafe at what they see as his lack of vigour, the "radical centre" has all but evaporated, which should be the chief lesson drawn from the trajectory of Emmanuel Macron.
Though Lawson has a blindspot for the roots of New Labour in the 60s and 70s, he is in no doubt that its baleful legacy will live on: "The Iraq War broke the moral soul of Labour and corroded people’s belief in politics and democracy, helping pave the way for the rampant populism of today. Boris Johnson’s “Partygate” scandal is a disgrace but it has nothing on the degradation of democracy that was the Iraq War." While Iraq was a notable low-point in the governance of this country, Labour was re-elected in 2005. If our democracy was degraded, it was in the low turnout of the elections from 2001 onwards. And that disengagement was clearly the result of a wider corrosion than just the Iraq War. New Labour ultimately failed because it never offered a real alternative to the Tories - just more competent management and fewer sex scandals. That's not necessarily a bad pitch, but it hardly justified the messianic zeal of the true believers. Today's Labour leadership believes that the modesty of its pitch and lack of zeal are virtues and that voters have tired of Boris Johnson and adventurism. Its template isn't New Labour and Tony Blair so much as Old Labour and Hugh Gaitskell.
"My own view is that Blair was the most cynical and arrogant politician ever to inhabit Number 10. The current occupant doesn't come close."
ReplyDeleteThat's a bold statement! I would say that Blair's cynicism and arrogance opened the way to the Johnson/Brexit era of cynicism and arrogance. I disagree with the centrist commentators who say that Brexit has opened up an era of open lying; Blair showed what you could get away with and others followed. The significance of the invasion of Iraq was the arrogant mendacity, both before and after, as much as the actual invasion and occupation.